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11.21.2012

Fantastic news for current backers and also the yet-unconvinced: not only has Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward thrown his weight behind the frequently-featuredKickstarter for LA Game Space — the would-be local/online cultural center and residency space for pushing the medium of games — with the amazingly earnest animated appeal above, you guys, but…

He used the opportunity to reprise a fantastic speech he gave back in 2006 for GDC’s Game Design Challenge — the theme that year was designing a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize (which went on to be won by Dishonored designer Harvey Smith, as I covered in this interview with Smith, back in a former life) — but then moved on to cover a wide variety of topics, all revolving around the central idea of spreading peace & love through videogames.

Below the fold you’ll find the entirety of Takahashi’s talk, including musings on the aesthetics of the controller & re-framing the environment around us with play (and with Kokoromi co-founder & designer Heather Kelley‘s glasses), presented here on Venus Patrol with high hopes that it’ll inspire a little more peace and love from designers and players alike.

In addition to the new iPhone 5-compatible ‘battery’ paper above (my old favorite lock-screen image), he’s slightly redesigned the new Noby GIRL image, and made an iPhone 4/4S version of that particular paper available for the first time. You can find all of the wallpapers via his uvula.jp blog, or archived here, below the fold.

10.16.2012

As if I didn’t have enough latent guilt about impulse-upgrading to an iPhone 5 I didn’t necessarily really need, the first thing I realized on activation was that the extra row of icons had unceremoniously broken my favorite part of the phone: my original Noby Noby Boy wallpaper, which saw BOY playfully looped around each of your icons, and surprises hidden under each which only revealed themselves as you opened an adjacent folder.

And so, I registered my complaint with Katamari Damacy & Noby creator Keita Takahashi, who, even though he hadn’t yet upgraded himself, offered to alleviate the situation by creating an newer, longer version, and even threw in a brand new GIRL version for our troubles.

10.3.2012

Maybe the fastest turnaround between awesome and awful news: Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi has just announced the thing we all feared the most (or is it just my own recurring nightmare?), that Namco Bandai will be removing and no longer supporting the Noby Noby Boy iPhone & iPad apps from the App Store next Tuesday, October 9th.

What exactly this means for the service at large is still undetermined: for months now, submitted meters wouldn’t actually be subtracted from the app’s running total, and the Facebook counterpart where you earned badges based on the size of your submission had long since fallen into disrepair as well, but there’s no word yet on whether the servers will continue to run and the PS3 game, at least, will further GIRL’s goal of stretching toward the edge of the solar system.

For now, then, a reminder to grab the app if you haven’t already, which Keita admits is “a totally silly app, but I’m enjoying it sometimes, even now”, signing off simply by saying, “Thank you for playing this silly app.”

9.11.2009

Noby Noby BOY creator Keita Takahashi first revealed his intentions to create an iPhone version of the PS3 downloadable at this year’s Game Developers Conference, which is intended, he said, to help GIRL progress through the universe more rapidly, as both the console and handheld version work in tandem to add players’ various stretches to her overall length.

Namco’s just delivered the shot at top to Japan’s Game Watch news site, without much further detail than the concept has passed internal approval at the studio, and that, adds Takahashi, it’s somewhere around 60 percent complete.

See the video above for my shakycam footage of Takahashi’s original reveal, which shows what’s clearly not intended to be a full 3D port of the PS3 version, but will likely end up at least a similarly goal-less toy-like diversion.

8.9.2009

Presumably this’ll work just as well as a toy for your favorite non-feline as well, but over on the official PlayStation Europe messageboard, forum member pudgeeagogo has posted full instructions to knit up your own catnip-drenched Noby Noby BOY, if you can stomach the horror of seeing his innocent little •.• face getting mercilessly torn at by your pet’s razor-toothed maw.

The instructions are embedded under the jump, as well, only because I’m terrified the thread will one day disappear and all this hard-won knowledge will go with it. [via Gus]

6.1.2009

I consider it a Very Lucky Day when I wake up to an email from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, who this time wrote to remind me that Noby‘s GIRL had finally made the last push to Mars.

And just when I was reaching for the reply button to remind him that I’d actually already done my tribute post to the occasion, I realized just what his enclosed above video actually was. Embarrassing admission: it kind of gave me goosebumps.

5.26.2009

I did my damndest to capture Noby Noby GIRL’s triumphant march to Mars via in-game video (you only get the one chance to see the victory-wrap), but my attempts were stymied by the video capability not going live until you actually exit your house.

Accept, then, this commemorative photo above as proof of Noby‘s ongoing popularity, even if Takahashi and co. are pulling out every trick in the book to lessen the dead time between planets, from the upcoming iPhone version, to the SynchroBOY trick which lets single players control multiple boys at a time, to the recent Lucky Week promotion, which saw submitted lengths randomly given various multipliers, which happened to be the final straw that pushed GIRL to her goal.

So what’s life actually like on the red planet? Much the same, so far, though with the addition of new martian inhabitants, obviously, and, more intriguingly, the super-sized royalty unlocked when we reached the moon now making the rounds (on my back, as above).

I wolfram’d (are we allowed to say that yet?) the distance from Mars to Jupiter, GIRL’s next step, which gave me an AU distance over double that from Earth to Mars, meaning, I suppose, that we should expect — barring more of Namco’s divine intervention — at least another 6-7 months before we see the Jovian giant even starting to come into view.